Willie Nelson

by Graeme Thomson

  Nick Hunter: Jerry fell in love with a younger woman and pretty much by the beginning of Shotgun Willie he disappeared for a year and really had nothing to do with it. I believe the actual producer of that first record was Arif Mardin, not Jerry.

  Nelson already had most of the Phases And Stages songs in his back pocket, but there were problems with clearing them for recording because he had originally cut them for RCA back in April 1972. In any case, he seemed not to want to make a conventional country record at this point. In the end he came away with not one but two albums, and neither was like anything he had ever made before. They cut 33 songs in 5 days – ‘It’s a record, even for Atlantic!’ shouted Arif Mardin happily,6 little realising that this was slow by Nashville standards. Working twelve-hour shifts, the musicians still found time for carousing and what Rolling Stone postulated may have been ‘coupling’ in the darkest corners of the studio. In the first two days he recorded the tracks for a gospel record, or rather a record of traditional gospel songs filtered through a country sensibility, with Bobbie’s piano well to the fore. It had been a project he’d been trying to get going for years.

  Willie Nelson: RCA wouldn’t let me do one. They thought I needed to be a more established country artist before I could do a gospel album. They didn’t think gospel songs were commercial themselves and I knew they were because I knew that we were singing ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’ and ‘Amazing Grace’ every night and everyone was singing along.7

  The one contemporary song was ‘The Troublemaker’, written by doowop singers Bruce Belland and David Somerville, which drew an explicit analogy between the hippie dissenters of the time and Jesus. Indeed, it would have been impossible for Nelson not to have recognised more than a passing resemblance to his own recent situation with RCA and the country music establishment in the opening stanzas: ‘He was nothing but the troublemaking kind/ His hair was much too long and his motley group of friends/ Had nothing but rebellion on their minds.’ Indeed, music business politics were never far from the surface. There is no doubt that the gospel record was close to Nelson’s – and his sister’s – heart, but as Reshen points out, it was also a firm statement of intent.

  Neil Reshen: Willie was astounded when we took him to Atlantic and he sat down with Jerry Wexler. The first albums we did, Shotgun Willie and the gospel album, he did basically to see how far he could push Atlantic. He would test everything.

  In this case, Atlantic played a canny game with Nelson: they allowed him to record the gospel record but made no promises about when it would come out. Having exhausted his favourite standards from the book of Sacred Service Hymns, he then turned from the holy to the profane. The remainder of the sessions were devoted to making what would become Shotgun Willie, the album proper. He had no new songs when he arrived in New York. The title track came to him in the bathroom of the Holiday Inn where he was staying during the recording of the record, and its light-hearted shuffle masks the deeper panic of writer’s block as he prepared to throw himself into his new record for a new label. ‘You can’t make a record/ If you ain’t got nothin’ to say,’ he sang, and it is indeed a litany of non-sequiturs, unconnected images and scenes of creative stasis. It seemed to do the trick.

  Willie Nelson: [It] assured me once again that when I was under pressure to write songs in a hurry, I could still do it. I wrote . . . that whole album in about a week.

  In fact, there were only four new originals on the record. ‘Shotgun Willie’ kicked off side one with a soulful swagger, its drunken horns and easy blues announcing it as one for the kids at the Armadillo rather than the good ole boys in the Broken Spoke, but ‘Sad Songs And Waltzes’ was pure blue country, both a broken-hearted love song and a pointed dig at how out of step he had been in the music industry through the years: ‘It’s a good thing that I’m not a star/ You don’t know how lucky you are/ My record may say it/ But no one will play it/ Sad songs and waltzes aren’t selling this year.’ The syncopated rock of ‘Devil In The Sleeping Bag’ was an ode to Paul, hunkered down in the van as the band travelled back to – inevitably – Texas. The record ended with Willie alone with his guitar on ‘A Song For You’, Leon Russell’s minor-key marvel, and in-between Nelson nailed some classics to the mast: he cut Johnny Bush’s ‘Whiskey River’, although those familiar with the versions he has since played – what is it, about a million times? – in concert will find its relaxed pace a shock. He revisited ‘Local Memory’, ‘She’s Not For You’ and ‘So Much To Do’ from his RCA days and revved up versions of Bob Wills’ peerless ‘Stay All Night (Stay A Little Longer)’ and Cindy Walker’s ‘Bubbles In My Beer’, both of which had been recorded in Nashville.

  Satisfied, after five days he called a cab from the studio, headed for the airport, and was playing at Big G’s in Round Rock by the following night. The album was launched at the Armadillo in April 1973 and the end result sounded like a man set free, the horns and strings adding texture as he gleefully skidded all over the vast expanses of American music. There is little sense – aside perhaps from the closing ‘A Song For You’ – that Shotgun Willie was made against the backdrop of real personal tragedy. Paul English’s wife Carlene killed herself on 3 January, just a month before recording began, and Nelson had been at the scene when it had happened at the apartment complex on Riverside Drive.

  Connie Nelson: I was four months pregnant with Amy, and I was fixing breakfast. I’d just gotten the kids up for school, Billy and Susie, and Paula was there. I heard screaming from somewhere but I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t hear it again, and went back to fixing breakfast. Then I heard a banging on our glass door, and it was Carlene’s son. I opened it up and he said, ‘It’s Mom, it’s Mom, come quick, come on!’ I ran over in my pyjamas, Willie was in his underwear, ran next door and she was gone. It was horrible. Just disbelief.

  Paul English, by his own admission, went even further off the rails than he was already. He couldn’t part with Carlene’s clothes, he went from 180 lbs to 130 lbs in ‘the press of a button’, he began living life with a death wish. For the next five years he became the eye of the hurricane as the band went through their wildest times on the road. After the suicide, Nelson had told him, ‘We’ll go to work whenever you’re ready to go to work,’ and he had showed up for the Shotgun Willie sessions less than two months later. But he wasn’t really there.

  Paul English: I don’t remember much. I didn’t want to live, I wanted to die, I didn’t care what happened. Tried to make myself die and I couldn’t even do it. Willie put up with me and I don’t know how. Just a solid kind of person. I appreciate him for that because I look back and think: Well I did that and I did that. That was terrible. I scared myself. I’d look in the mirror and I didn’t know who the guy was. I was taking a lot of pills. I’d just go to the drugstore and get what I wanted. Didn’t pay for them or anything – I’d just take them.

  Connie arranged for Nelson to take Paul to Mexico in his old Mercedes to meet up with Kris Kristofferson, who was filming Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid down in Durango with Bob Dylan and Sam Peckinpah. While they were gone, she went over to the English apartment and got rid of all Carlene’s old clothes, which were still hanging in the closet. Later, Nelson wrote ‘I Still Can’t Believe That You’re Gone’ about English’s wife. His daughter Paula Carlene had been named in her honour, and she had been a close friend over the years. He waited nearly a year before playing it to English, unsure of what his reaction might be.

  Paul English: I didn’t know he wrote it, as a matter of fact we were over at Darrell Royal’s house, and the Coach asked me, ‘Have you heard this song that Willie wrote about Carlene?’ I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’ Of course he did it for me then, and it brought me to tears, I tell you that.

  ‘I Still Can’t Believe That You’re Gone’ would end up on Nelson’s next Atlantic album, Phases And Stages. That Shotgun Willie had sold far better than anything he had ever done was hardly an achievement in itself, but it had taken him firmly out of the
country camp and into the endless waters of contemporary music. Far from seeing Nelson’s image as a disadvantage, Atlantic were happy to emphasise it. This was 1973, after all, and the Rolling Stones had just made Exile On Main Street, David Bowie was miming fellatio upon his guitarist on stage, and punk was no more than three years away. A beard, an earring and a little pot were hardly going to hurt. The Shotgun Willie album cover showed him cheerfully dishevelled, staring out of the twin barrels of what was supposed to be a shotgun, but actually looked like a pair of aviator shades turned upside down. Even the choice of the first single, released in July 1973, was tactical. Common sense dictated that ‘Stay All Night (Stay A Little Longer)’ would be the obvious choice – it was a familiar song and perhaps the most straightforward and upbeat country song on the record – but it was felt that might be too safe an option.

  Nick Hunter: I remember Neil [Reshen] wanted to put out ‘Shotgun Willie’ as the first single. I asked why and he said, ‘Well, it’s not a hit, but the image will last with Willie Nelson for a long time.’ I didn’t quite get that at the time, but he was correct. The record wasn’t a hit, but you’ll still see Willie referred to in some quarters still as ‘Shotgun Willie’.

  ‘Stay All Night (Stay A Little Longer)’ became the second single and was more successful, reaching No. 22 in the Billboard country charts in October. The same month Nelson was voted into the Nashville Songwriter’s Association Hall Of Fame, which must have struck him as a rich irony. At the presentation dinner he picked up his guitar and got up to sing all his best songs, one coming relentlessly after the other. It was a show of defiance; a thank you; and above all, a final farewell.

  THE OUTLAW

  WHAT DOES IT mean to be an Outlaw?

  Willie Nelson talks about Waylon Jennings.

  ‘He was an ornery son-of-a-bitch and I could relate to that. I seemed to be a little more laid-back, but I could definitely relate to where he was because I was also there at one time. That’s why I could laugh and say, “Waylon, go for it.” We were doing the same thing, basically.’

  He talks about the convenience of the label.

  ‘It was definitely necessary,’ he says. ‘Otherwise, everybody would have thought it was OK to do it the way it was being done. So that’s where I was, and Waylon and Kris and John. A whole lot of guys who were doing it the way they felt it.’

  But what does it mean to be an Outlaw?

  He thinks for a while. Somewhere down below some music is playing.

  ‘I think I’m most interested in pleasing myself.’

  8. 1974–1976

  THERE IS AN extremely persuasive argument which states that the first half of the 70s, the period immediately prior to mainstream exposure, marks the creative pinnacle of Nelson’s entire career. There were several factors in his favour: he had escaped from the Nashville system and was now working with a rock label – albeit in their stuttering country division – with people who understood what he was and what he needed, and the effect on his output was audible. In the years between 1971 and 1975 his records became more focused than they had ever been previously and – with a few notable exceptions – would ever be again. Rather than simply laying down a series of unconnected tracks, he thought deeply about what he was doing in the studio and found unifying themes and emotions linking the songs. While he remained an enthusiast of the one-or-two-takes-and-move-on ethos, his writing, his sound and his ideas all came together with a cohesion and a confidence – and an intensity – which he would later find hard to match. Crucially, he was untethered by any artistic restrictions and could write freely in the knowledge that he would hear his ideas reach fruition on record, but on the other hand he was not yet at the stage where he could release anything he wanted – and thus not have to write at all. This sheltered cusp between cult status and superstardom created both a necessity and an outlet which made it a gloriously fertile time to create.

  His songwriting and recording also benefited from the fact that he was touring less heavily and within a smaller radius than he had previously. Texas had become a base, a haven, and one he was reluctant to leave. He recorded the pilot episode for the landmark Austin City Limits TV show in October 1974. Originally it was going to feature both Nelson and Doug Sahm, until he came back and said: ‘My manager said I can’t do it with Doug. I’ve got to do it by myself or I don’t do it.’ It was a smart tactical manoeuvre by the leader of the Texas pack: don’t share it. He knew he was building something important and solid there, and felt little inclination to go slogging around the country trying to break every last market.

  Nick Hunter: When we were at Atlantic he didn’t want to go on the road, it was just something he didn’t really want to do. Part of it was he didn’t feel he was really accomplishing anything out there.

  He had a vibrant epicentre in his annual showpiece picnics and he believed that the aftershock would spread, at which point it would be time to go and proclaim the word in person. But it was records which would really get him noticed. After the Shotgun Willie album he was increasingly picked up on the wider radar. The Rolling Stones came knocking but the timing was all wrong. The band – most specifically Keith Richards, who had been close friends with Gram Parsons – were all country fans, and in 1974 they asked Nelson to open for them on their 1975 US tour. He turned them down.

  Mickey Raphael: You know, that stuff didn’t mean anything to him. I was 20, 21, and to me they were the biggest band in the world. They were my idols, and I was like, ‘What are we doing? [Turning down the Stones] to stay in Texas?!’ Willie was like, ‘Oh, here I can go home every night and we play sold out audiences. Why go around the world with them when I can play to my fans here? What’s the point?’ Why go from number one to an opening act, which is what he would have been on that tour. He was King of the Hill in Texas.

  His time at Atlantic was to prove short-lived but it left a significant legacy. Rather like his spell with Monument a decade earlier, some of his best work was created at a label which – with the benefit of hindsight – was not all that much more than a stepping stone. Following on from the considered success of Shotgun Willie, Nelson went back into the studio to make Phases And Stages for Atlantic, a record which had been almost complete in his mind for at least two years. He had originally recorded most of the songs in his final sessions for RCA in April 1972, and had had to utilise all of Neil Reshen’s hard-headed legal trickery to get the songs back. He had loved Yesterday’s Wine, his concept album about life and death. The idea of a cycle of songs appealed to his world view, the circular, karmic notion of endless life, as well as to his view of music as a unifying force.

  Willie Nelson: I was just tired of albums with twelve separate moods and twelve separate ideas and with nothing to connect them, no thought following through the album. If you’re sitting in a living room and you’re listening to an album and you have a certain mood going, you don’t want that trip broken.1

  He now planned a thematic album looking at the end of a relationship, first from the perspective of the man on side one, and then from the perspective of the woman on side two. Obviously it was territory he knew well, by heart you might say, but it was a flimsy concept which soon expanded to find room for ‘I Still Can’t Believe That You’re Gone’, Nelson’s heartfelt farewell to Carlene English; ‘It’s Not Supposed To Be This Way’ – a new song written for his daughter Susie as they drove to Colorado together and tried to work out how to get close to the heart of the matter – and the closing ‘Pick Up The Tempo’, which was both a defiant cry of belief in what he was doing and a rallying call to his fellow musical rebels: ‘People are saying that time will take care of people like me/ And that I’m living too fast and they say I can’t last for much longer/ But little they see that their thoughts of me is my saviour/ And little they know that the beat ought to go just a little faster.’ In other words: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

  This time Wexler was on board as producer and he pushed hard to bring Nelson down to Muscle Shoa
ls in Alabama to work with his elite team of studio musicians, who had played on fistfuls of classic recordings by Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Ray Charles et al. The band were used to working primarily within the boundaries of R&B and rock music but could turn their hand to virtually anything. Wexler liked to keep them fresh and had said very little about what was expected, with the result that only a few of them really had any idea who Nelson was; they knew that if Wexler was a fan then he must have something going for him and were excited by the prospect of the experience, but they also found Nelson’s working methods a little incongruous. He arrived alone in his old Mercedes, having driven himself from Texas. There were no advance tapes of the material, and yet he expected them to simply play the whole album through from start to finish.

  David Hood: He walks in with that guitar that has the hole in it, and he’s ready to go. That’s what was so funny for us: him wanting to sit down and play straight through – ‘But we don’t know the songs!’ Normally you learn a song, record it, learn another song, record it, but he just wanted to go through the whole thing. He just thought we could pick ’em up and do it. We had to talk him into more or less doing it our way.

  It went very fast. The record came together quickly, virtually live. Most of the tracks were first or second takes. The Muscle Shoals men had worked together for an age and were experts at divining the heart and soul of a song quicker than most. They were businesslike, on time and ready to go any time of day or night. Perfect for Nelson. He would play the songs to the band on his guitar, they would make a chord chart, it would be recorded, and they would move on. Barry Beckett, playing keyboards, regarded it as a meeting of country and blues, and Wexler’s role was no more complicated than making sure everyone was happy, pulling in the same direction, and ensuring that the tapes were rolling.